Difference between revisions of "Team:William and Mary/OutreachDatabase"

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<div style = 'padding-left: 10px; padding-bottom: 0px;font-size: 25px' ><b>Summary</b></div>
  
  
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<div style="text-indent: 15px;line-height: 26px;">We constructed our outreach activities so that they worked together to meet an overall goal, which  was to help local middle school and high school students learn more about synthetic biology and to increase their future opportunities to be a part of this emerging field. To reach this goal we had two linked objectives. The first objective was to co-design strategies and educational materials to effectively reach this target audience. The second, and arguably more important, objective was that the program be sustainable so that it can have a continuing impact on our community even beyond the end of the project. We started our outreach co-design process by consulting our community about their needs and what they would like to gain from a potential collaboration, as well as consulting education experts about the best way to get involved with teachers and students.</div>
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<div style="text-indent: 15px;line-height: 26px;padding-left: 7%; padding-right: 7%;">iGEM has established an infrastructure to ensure that scientific research is rigorously characterized, accessible, and centralized on the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. The iGEM program also emphasizes the value of outreach, encouraging teams to implement meaningful human practices projects. We aim to expand the infrastructure of sharing and building on past projects to the human practices aspect of iGEM. To that end, we have created a comprehensive database that includes outreach projects done by gold-medal teams in the past two years. The approximately 1,500 entries are in a standardized format that makes it easy to assess and compare projects. Additionally, each entry contains descriptive tags, enabling users to search for specific project categories. We hope to establish this database as a central part of iGEM, encouraging teams to reflect and build upon past projects and document future outreach to ensure that iGEM is a continuous force for innovation and progress in outreach.  
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<div style="text-indent: 15px;line-height: 26px;">To meet the second objective we found that we needed to expand our intended target audience to include educators. Including educators means that we can have a longer and larger impact through our local school system. But it also meant that we needed to adapt our educational materials to fit the context and incentives of the school system.</div>
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<div style = 'padding-left: 10px; padding-bottom: 0px;font-size: 25px' ><b>Introduction</b></div>
  
  
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<div style="text-indent: 15px;line-height: 26px;padding-left: 2%; padding-right: 2%;">iGEM has strong infrastructure to ensure that teams can easily share the products of their scientific research with other teams and scientists. The Registry of Standard Biological Parts encourages teams to rigorously characterize projects in a way that makes them replicable, or in a way on which other teams may build. These ideas of replicability and iterative progress are central to the scientific process.
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<div style="text-indent: 15px;line-height: 26px;padding-left: 2%; padding-right: 2%;">The iGEM program places a strong emphasis on human practices by having teams reflect upon how their work will impact the world, and how the world can impact their work. Many iGEM teams have created and implemented outstanding human practices projects that they have documented on their wikis. While the expectation exists that human practices projects should be well-documented and an important part of iGEM projects, the infrastructure for outreach does not currently exist in the way that it exists for the scientific research. This also means that there is not as much incentive for teams to present their work with enough rigor and detail for others to replicate or build on their outreach projects.</div>
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<div style="text-indent: 15px;line-height: 26px;">Next, we did a wide array of outreach activities that helped address the goals of our community and our own goals:</div>
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<div style="text-indent: 15px;line-height: 26px;padding-left: 2%; padding-right: 2%;">Our goals in creating the database are the following:</div>
  
  
 
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<li><div style="text-indent: 5px;line-height: 26px;">After consulting the School Education, we improved our synthetic biology Activities Booklet to make it more accessible to teachers. We then publicized it to educators in our teacher focus group and online. The booklet exists in a permanent form on our wiki, and will be accessible to everyone for years to come.</div></li>
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<li><div style="text-indent: 5px;line-height: 26px;">Centralize and make more accessible the [not sucking up description word] outreach projects that happens through the iGEM program</div></li>
  
 
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<li><div style="text-indent: 5px;line-height: 26px;">We are working with educators to strengthen the network between W&M and the teachers in the school district, train them, and get feedback on the curriculum including how to make it fit into their overall STEM curriculum. Additionally, based on teacher feedback, we are in the process of forming a STEM outreach organization to continue our collaboration with teachers year-round. </div></li>
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<li><div style="text-indent: 5px;line-height: 26px;">Present outreach projects in a more standardized way that makes them easier to compare and evaluate </div></li>
  
  
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<li><div style="text-indent: 5px;line-height: 26px;">We also worked through civic organizations like the Girl Scouts, as well as a local STEM summer camp, that targeted this same age group.</div></li>
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<li><div style="text-indent: 5px;line-height: 26px;">Make it easier for future iGEM team to build off past projects and make improvement on existing ideas</div></li>
  
 
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<li><div style="text-indent: 5px;line-height: 26px;">We worked with Virginia State Senator to improve networking with the school district and find out how to get our resources to the people who want them.</div></li>
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<li><div style="text-indent: 5px;line-height: 26px;">Analyze recent past outreach and make suggestions for improvement based off findings</div></li>
  
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<li><div style="text-indent: 5px;line-height: 26px;">We did general publicity of our research and the synthetic biology research at our college, since this field is still relatively new and not very well known.</div></li>
 
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<li><div style="text-indent: 5px;line-height: 26px;">We created the Outreach Database, a compilation of the outreach projects done by gold medal teams in 2016 and 2015. This database organizes the project into categories and is a searchable tool for future iGEM teams to analyze past outreach and for teachers who want to find synthetic biology educational activities.</div></li>
 
  
  
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<div style = 'padding-left: 10px; padding-bottom: 0px;font-size: 25px' ><b>Explanation of the structure and content</b></div>
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<div style="text-indent: 15px;line-height: 26px;padding-left: 2%; padding-right: 2%;">Our intention with the database entries is not to have a comprehensive explanation of each outreach project. Rather, we want it to act as a basic description, but have the wiki be the more detailed source of information for each project. This is for two reasons. First, teams made their wiki entries themselves and it is the most accurate representation of their outreach projects. Second, database entries are meant to be concise summaries of projects that can be used more easily. We wanted to avoid overcomplicating them by including too much information. Therefore we chose to classify projects by basic project information, project characteristics, and outcomes.
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<div style="text-indent: 15px;line-height: 26px;padding-left: 7%; padding-right: 7%;"><b>Basic Project Information: </b>This is information that all outreach projects should have. It includes the school name, school section, year, outreach category, and the title of the outreach project.
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<div style="text-indent: 15px;line-height: 26px;padding-left: 7%; padding-right: 7%;"><b>Project Characteristics: </b>Information that is descriptive and could be obtained prior to the project. It documents the aims of the project but does not provide information as to what happened. We met with Dr. Monica Griffin, the professor in charge of the community-based research and engagement program at the College. She suggested making categories for audience and objectives, where the objectives are listed as simple steps to complete the project, making them more replicable. Lastly, we also chose to include “products,” or a tangible pdf, document, video, or other ____ that helps improve the replicability of projects and publicize information that could be useful for other iGEM teams.
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<div style="text-indent: 15px;line-height: 26px;padding-left: 7%; padding-right: 7%;"><b>Project Results: </b>Post-project information that helps characterize its efficacy. After consulting with Dr. Griffin, we decided to include data, reach, and analysis. Data is a tool to evaluate outreach effectiveness, and a way to see impact on the audience. The reach gives a metric for someone else to be able to assess the magnitude of impact. Analysis is the team’s own assessment of the outreach events, and could include suggestions for improvement.
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<div style="text-indent: 15px;line-height: 26px;">While some of our outreach to our community was short-term, we worked closely with our community partners to ensure that our impact does not end with this project. We are in the process of forming a recognized STEM outreach organization at our college that will consist of members of the 2017 team and other interested students. </div>
 
  
  

Revision as of 19:49, 1 November 2017




Summary
iGEM has established an infrastructure to ensure that scientific research is rigorously characterized, accessible, and centralized on the Registry of Standard Biological Parts. The iGEM program also emphasizes the value of outreach, encouraging teams to implement meaningful human practices projects. We aim to expand the infrastructure of sharing and building on past projects to the human practices aspect of iGEM. To that end, we have created a comprehensive database that includes outreach projects done by gold-medal teams in the past two years. The approximately 1,500 entries are in a standardized format that makes it easy to assess and compare projects. Additionally, each entry contains descriptive tags, enabling users to search for specific project categories. We hope to establish this database as a central part of iGEM, encouraging teams to reflect and build upon past projects and document future outreach to ensure that iGEM is a continuous force for innovation and progress in outreach.
Introduction
iGEM has strong infrastructure to ensure that teams can easily share the products of their scientific research with other teams and scientists. The Registry of Standard Biological Parts encourages teams to rigorously characterize projects in a way that makes them replicable, or in a way on which other teams may build. These ideas of replicability and iterative progress are central to the scientific process.
The iGEM program places a strong emphasis on human practices by having teams reflect upon how their work will impact the world, and how the world can impact their work. Many iGEM teams have created and implemented outstanding human practices projects that they have documented on their wikis. While the expectation exists that human practices projects should be well-documented and an important part of iGEM projects, the infrastructure for outreach does not currently exist in the way that it exists for the scientific research. This also means that there is not as much incentive for teams to present their work with enough rigor and detail for others to replicate or build on their outreach projects.
Our goals in creating the database are the following:
  1. Centralize and make more accessible the [not sucking up description word] outreach projects that happens through the iGEM program
  2. Present outreach projects in a more standardized way that makes them easier to compare and evaluate
  3. Make it easier for future iGEM team to build off past projects and make improvement on existing ideas
  4. Analyze recent past outreach and make suggestions for improvement based off findings
Explanation of the structure and content
Our intention with the database entries is not to have a comprehensive explanation of each outreach project. Rather, we want it to act as a basic description, but have the wiki be the more detailed source of information for each project. This is for two reasons. First, teams made their wiki entries themselves and it is the most accurate representation of their outreach projects. Second, database entries are meant to be concise summaries of projects that can be used more easily. We wanted to avoid overcomplicating them by including too much information. Therefore we chose to classify projects by basic project information, project characteristics, and outcomes.
Basic Project Information: This is information that all outreach projects should have. It includes the school name, school section, year, outreach category, and the title of the outreach project.
Project Characteristics: Information that is descriptive and could be obtained prior to the project. It documents the aims of the project but does not provide information as to what happened. We met with Dr. Monica Griffin, the professor in charge of the community-based research and engagement program at the College. She suggested making categories for audience and objectives, where the objectives are listed as simple steps to complete the project, making them more replicable. Lastly, we also chose to include “products,” or a tangible pdf, document, video, or other ____ that helps improve the replicability of projects and publicize information that could be useful for other iGEM teams.
Project Results: Post-project information that helps characterize its efficacy. After consulting with Dr. Griffin, we decided to include data, reach, and analysis. Data is a tool to evaluate outreach effectiveness, and a way to see impact on the audience. The reach gives a metric for someone else to be able to assess the magnitude of impact. Analysis is the team’s own assessment of the outreach events, and could include suggestions for improvement.